Creating quality content that your audience actually wants to read is no small feat. As marketing platform noise increases, how can you engage mass audiences with simple blog content?
Blog content must convey simplicity, focus and drive. Effective blogs can remain relevant for years after publishing, so what’s the key?
Follow these 6 steps to create blogs your audience actually wants to read:
- Research and Plan
Before any high quality blog post can be formed, research is vital. Identifying what is going on in the market, industry or climate is a crucial tool in making your content relevant.
- Structure and Outline
When writing blogs, a clear defined structure is critical. Scannability and clarity in your writing is key. Audiences will simply move on if your content takes too long to understand.
- Audience Focus
Before writing any blog, discovering what your audience wants to read about is crucial. Great blog writers will understand how their content resonates with their audience.
When defining your audience, forming buyer personas can allow for clear and targeted content. Segmentation allows a writer to form content that is deliberate and focused on select customer profiles and user types. Understanding your audience is central to understanding what they want to read.
- Tone and Personal Touch
It is important to integrate your personality throughout your blogs. Audiences are more likely to engage with content that has personality and flare.
Providing a personal touch by implementing an interesting angle or story behind the facts is also useful in increasing engagement. Accessibility is extremely important especially when writing about technology heavy material.
Read more about accessible content creation in our blog: ‘5 Tips for Making Your Tech Content More Accessible’ and ‘Does your content pass the ‘would I read it test?’
Integrating statistics and supporting facts adds substance but be careful, regurgitating too much report data can compromise engagement and increase the risk of switching your audience off.
- Call-to-action (CTA)
Providing CTAs in your blogs, such as ‘‘Like’ our Facebook page’, exposes the audience to additional content with limited effort. Your blogs will benefit from the use of hyperlinks to other material to increase the visibility of other content. This also provides another opportunity for the audience to engage with what is of interest to them. Increased touch points ensures a greater chance of long-term engagement.
- The Power of the Title
Headings or titles are vital as this is the first-point-of-contact your audience will have with your content. Titles must be snappy and clear as well as offering a point of interest to the audience. Think of the most creative way to make your content a ‘must read’ for all your customers and supply a human-interest story for your users to attach themselves to and share.
If you have any questions feel free to email me at info@ilexcontent.com
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